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The Contribution of Female Graduates to National Development: a Reading of Ama Ata Aidoo’S Changes and Buchi Emecheta’S Second Class Citizen

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The Contribution of Female Graduates to National Development: a Reading of Ama Ata Aidoo’S Changes and Buchi Emecheta’S Second Class Citizen Revue Africaine et Malgache de Recherche Scientifique (RAMReS) : Littérature, Langues et Linguistique N°7, 1er semestre – Juin 2018 The Contribution of Female Graduates to National Development: A Reading of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes and Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen Ayélé Fafavi D‟Almeida Université de Lomé Abstract – It is argued that women‟s education is biased in the sense that their natural role is to get married and bear children. That explains why in almost every country in the world, women‟s education has always lagged behind that of men. But it has been proved that education more precisely university education is a powerful weapon to fight against all forms of oppression. The impulse that drives my writing of this paper is the necessity to show how female graduates can valuably contribute in nation building in the light of two West African novels. Key words: female, graduates, national, development, education. Résumé – Il est souvent démontré que l‟éducation des femmes n‟est pas très importante du au fait que le rôle naturel des femmes est celui de se marier et de porter des enfants. Cela explique pourquoi dans presque chaque pays dans le monde, l‟éducation des femmes a du retard par rapport à celle des hommes. Cependant il a été prouvé que l‟éducation en général et plus précisément l‟éducation universitaire est un instrument puissant pour combattre toute forme d‟oppression. La nécessité de prouver que les femmes diplômées peuvent valablement contribuer à la construction d‟une nation est ce qui m‟a amené à écrire le présent article à la lumière de deux romans ouest africain. Mots clés : féminin, diplômées, national, développement, éducation. 1. Introduction Women‟s education is instrumental to social and societal development. “If you educate a man, you educate an individual. If you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” Tuzyline Jita Allan (1991, p.189) reports in an afterword to Aidoo‟s Changes the above statement. Ama Ata Aidoo acknowledges that it was from her father that she first heard the above wisdom. In his famous Anatomy of Female Power: A Masculinist Dissection of Matriarchy, Ibekwe Chinweizu (2005, p.15) expresses a similar view: “woman, who rules the nursery, shapes boys and girls for life; and the ways in which she shapes boys make them what they become as men.” In one way or the other, a woman is always assigned the role of an educator. She needs education and a higher education will make her a more articulate thinker. To achieve this goal, she needs to be educated herself, and this includes getting a college education. Aidoo, in an interview with James Adeola (1990, p.11), asserts that “education is the key, the key to everything.” Binwell Sinyangwe (2000, p.37) has his female character Nasula stress that standpoint to her daughter Sula: [email protected] The contribution of female graduates to national development: a reading of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes and Buchi Emecheta’s Second class citizen “You must go to school. You don‟t know what suffering I have gone through because apart from being poor and a woman, my parents did not send me to school. I don‟t want you to suffer the way I have suffered.” That statement and many similar ones by various people underscore the importance of female education. Unfortunately, girls‟ formal education is not given much importance in most contemporary African societies. In this paper the emphasis is laid on the need for girls‟ higher education, i.e. university education, as a prerequisite for their contribution to development. A female graduate is a woman who has successfully completed a university education and has received a certificate showing this credential. If female education lagged behind some decades ago, there is every evidence nowadays that women in higher social positions are educated. As a result their contributions to their countries‟ development are more concrete. Through their novels, some African female writers show the importance of female graduates to the development of society. “School – the Ibos never played with that! They were realizing fast that one‟s savior from poverty and disease was education. Every Ibo family saw to it that their children attended school. Boys were usually given preference, though.”1 Informed with reader-response criticism and based on the Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo‟s Changes and the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta‟s Second Class Citizen, this paper highlights the valuable contributions of female graduates to nation building and underscores the importance of female intellectuals in the development of a nation. Reader-response theory stresses the role of the reader in actively constructing meaning rather than passively consuming texts under consideration. ( Afagla2018: 2) This essay seeks on the one hand to underscore women‟s ability to get educated despite their origins, cultures and religions, and focuses on two characters - Adah and Fusena - respectively in Second Class Citizen and Changes as analytical references, on the other hand it shows how female graduates can valuably contribute in nation building. 2. Women’s School Education in a Patriarchal Setting William K. Frankena (1973, p.19) assigns a key role to education: The process by which the individual acquires the many physical and social capacities demanded of him by the group into which he is born and within which he must function, education is a collective technique which a society 1 Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen (London: Allison and Busby 1974), 9. Subsequent quotes are from this edition, parenthetically included, and preceded by SCC. Numéro 7, 1er Semestre – Juin 2018, 25-36 26 Ayélé Fafavi D’Almeida employs to instruct its youth in the values and accomplishments of the civilization within which it exists. Furthermore, Frankena (1973, p.31) concedes that education involves initiation in traditions of thought and action, while aiming at creating individuals who can and will make new advances within those traditions, i.e., do new work (or at least make independent judgments) in art, science, etc. Likewise, Louis Arnaud Reid (1986, p.109) regards education as “the preparation of children to be functionaries in whatever sort of adult society lies in wait for them.” From the foregoing definitions, education is a means for social mobility in modern societies. It is a process of training and learning – especially in schools or colleges – in view of collecting knowledge and developing skills. Definitely, formal education is a key factor in the preparedness of the youth for a better survival and social integration (Anawi 2010, p.205). Everybody needs formal and/or modern education because building a nation implies the collaboration between men and women. However, marriage and motherhood have heavily defined womanhood in traditional African societies. Motherhood has served as an identity benchmark for women in Africa because it is “closely linked to the understanding of African women‟s lives and identities within their sociocultural contexts.” (Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997, p.35) This state of affairs explains why for long, women‟s school education has been neglected, as society relegates the latter to domestic chores and child bearing roles. Customs, traditions and beliefs have kept women under subjugation over the years. These burdens have made them feel generally inferior to men and incapable of operating at the same level as men in society. (Dolphyne, 1991, p.1) In Emecheta‟s The Slave girl (1977, p.113), Amanna, a slave girl in Ma Palagada‟s house, asserts: “Every woman, whether slave or free, must marry. All her life a woman always belongs to some male.” Also, Nnu Ego, in Emecheta‟s The Joys of Motherhood (1979, p.186), complains in a prayer to God: “God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody‟s appendage?” In Dangarembga‟s Nervous Conditions (1988, p.15), Jeremiah, Tambu‟s father, holds that “cooking, not intellectual pursuits, defines womanhood and feminine living. He views education as what ruins women, distracting them from their gendered role.” On the basis of this statement by the character, one may infer that from masculine perspective, women do not need education. Again, Nfah- Abbenyi (1997, p.35) contends that motherhood has traditionally been the predominant framework of identity for women in African literature, be it from the perspective of male writers, or paradoxically, from that of female writers. So, 27 RAMReS Littérature, langues et linguistique The contribution of female graduates to national development: a reading of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes and Buchi Emecheta’s Second class citizen Sheila Ruth (1998, p.9) ironically agrees that “too much learning will drain away the energy we [women] needed to produce children.” Against the background of traditional male/patriarchal views, most female writers and critics have “emerged from „silence‟” (Kolawole, 1997, p.6), turning the picture upside down in many of their novels. They create female characters aspiring to modern education. Examples include, among others: Adah and Nko respectively in Emecheta‟s Second Class Citizen (1974) and Double Yoke (1982); Li in Zeynab Alkali‟s The Stillborn (1984); Tambudzai, Nyasha and Maiguru in Tsitsi Dangarembga‟s Nervous Conditions (1988); Esi, Fusena and Opokuya in Ama Ata Aidoo‟s Changes (1991); Chimere in Ifeoma Okoye‟s Chimere (1992); Enitan in Sefi Atta‟s Everything Good Will Come (2005) and Bolanle in Lola Shoneyin‟s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010). In Nwapa‟s Efuru (1966, p.165), a woman is no longer a failure because of her barrenness. Efuru the main character, states that: “it was a curse not to have children. Her people did not just take it as one of the numerous accidents of nature.
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